CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse
a year ago by Sean Tilley to c/fediverse
This was initially demoed at FediCon 2025, but CrowdBucks is an open source, self-hostable fundraising system that allows people to financially support one another. You use your existing Fediverse account to hold a fundraiser, and can also donate to other people's fundraisers as well. The form factor is kind of similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.
Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.
The company that's involved with the payment disputes between Steam, MasterCard, banks, 18+ games and Collective Shout. Stripe is the one handling payments between Steam and MasterCard. It got blamed, blamed others in return and suddenly is known to a lot more people but not in a good way.
Payment provider. Stripe.com
Klarna is like a payment layer on top of a payment processor, different things, even they recommend stripe:
We really need to figure out the payment system for the fediverse.... Good to see someone trying things.
When I put Stripe integration into PieFed I had absolutely zero donations through there, meanwhile my Patreon and Librepay had dozens of dollars in donations. Dozens!
People really really didn't want to donate directly, for some reason. So I disabled the Stripe option.
Instead, Patreon takes 8% and their only payout method is Paypal so Paypal takes a percentage (5%?) and then when I transfer it to my bank from Paypal there's a currency conversion so they take another 5%? and then I pay tax on whatever remains...
I wish CrowdBucks better luck than I had.
On our donation page, we put a breakdown of how much each platform takes from the donation and I think that is why a lot of users chose to donate through the methods that have lower / no fees: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate
I imagine as Crowdbucks develops, they will introduce more methods and improve user / platform choice. Dealing with payment platforms is annoying, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with over time
It also helps that Canada has a non-fee option that only has the downside of being traceable.
So as much as I dislike crypto, it is basically built to be enshitification proof. And hence a good fit for the fediverse. But I wouldn't want to touch the crypto ecosystem with a ten foot pole, nevermind a lemmy/mastodon integration
Which leaves us at the behest of traditional payment processors, and they are all faceless conglomerates who care not for anyone. Meaning we're fucked there too
Maybe we should instead not bring transactions to the fediverse
Sub penny on L2 and a couple / a few cents on mainnet unless a big event is happening on main.
lemmy indicates clearly liberapay is preferred . and it does seem to have an effect because patreon donations went down at some point while liberapay donations went up.
With that said liberapay fees are cited as being around 3.1% and maybe higher. some digital currencies are almost free (nano, ripple) and despite the hate you see i don't see a rational reason not to offer them as an option.
Stripe has an amazing amount of currencies for payouts and accepts all kinds of payment methods, really really comprehensive. Pretty low fees too. Simple API and great great docs. They're all good.
Actually, there's a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there's literally no reason not to.
Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.
Yeah, good question.
From their website
From people you know
CrowdBucks is created by individual people you know, and not a large face-less corporation
And yet, there are no people shown on the website. How do I do know if I know these people?
I've said it before, I think there's money in a service that crowd funds open source donations.
I use so much FOSS that making sure they all get some money is a real first world problem. If I can only give £10 that month what do I do? Rotate who gets the tenner? Give everyone £.20? Then you have to figure out how each service wants funding and organise that.
Instead I could go to FOSSfund select all the software I use and donate £x. That money gets divvyed up and stored with other people's donations until a threshold is reached.
When enough money is accrued the service makes a substantial donation. The FOSSfund itself is funded through interest gained while holding donations.
Of course I am a naive user that wants good things to exist and has no idea the difficulties in making them happen. Brb, off to vibecode a payment system. I forsee no problems. I will not be taking questions or feedback at this time.
I think https://liberapay.com/ does that?
Holy-shit it does!!! I couldn't find any of the main repos I want to donate too: Pi-Hole, jellyfin/seerr, *arr, immich. I guess that's an outreach problem? Getting PromoFaux (Pi-Hole) onto librapay. Pledges seem to help with that.
But Lemmy, Syncthing and Vaultwardern is in in there. I have a tonne of services using MySQL, it's in there.
Thank you kind stranger, my bank acct hates you.
immich does not accept donations anymore, they "sell you a license" (there was a loot of drama for this...).
jellyfin does not accept donations at all. they say that in the website.
I saw Immich's licence. I don't want to dig up old drama though.
I was unaware jellyfin didn't take donations.
I thought they would both take donations though. Money is money after all.
Remember, Passw0rd1! is a handy filler, meets most password requirements, and is a strong password!
'Hunter2' Was my original plan, yours is much better with a special charachter, thank you.
Which is that? All I see is "*******".
Just curious: would any of this be able to circumvent or prevent this unspeakable crime:
Gofundme cancels accounts of Palestinians: https://mastodon.social/...
Sweet so now we have OpenCollective, Librepay, and now CrowdBucks. All kind of filling different roles it seems. On going orgnization funding (with transparency as a goal), patronige of a project/group you support (with ease as a goal), and now fundraising (which is generally a limited time activity).
Am I comparing them all pretty well here? Or is there anythjng im missing?
similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.
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@lemmy.world
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
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tl;dr: it uses stripe
save